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Posted by Buck (67.159.128.21) on 09:06:49 08/17/25
In Reply to: Yellowstone posted by Francoise Musgrove
... why not have an even stronger gatekeeper to keep people out of the wilderness. Let's have entrance fees at $500 per person. That will greatly reduce the influence of humans in National Parks. Let's close off most access points. Let's get those wooden walkways and huge seating areas off from the wild thermals, such as Old Faithful. And better yet, how good are those asphalt roads you drive on to 'see' the wild park? And the cars themselves... they spew CO2, they hit animals, kill famous bears and wolves, and they need huge paved parking lots. Stores and gas stations and resorts? Inside a protected National Park?
Wait, there's a sign on one of the entrance areas of Yellowstone that says, "For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People".
Do we need resorts and destructive infrastructure to the stress and demise of the animals and nature for us to find benefit and enjoyment for the people, "Mother Earth" as you say?
There is an elephant in the room, a massive hypocrisy, for the environmentalists who scream protect nature while driving cars and riding on paved roads and staying in resorts.
The park has 5 entrances 466 miles of roads with 310 miles of those roads being paved. We collar wolves and bears (nothing worse as a photographer to see a bear or wolves in the 'wild' with big fat man-placed collars on them.)
Man, not Mother Earth, has determined Yellowstone should maintain a bison population between 3,500 and 6,000 animals. It goes over that? Slaughter. A bison calf seen drowning in a river, alongside a ROAD, and man jumps out of his car from the ROAD and rescues it, a heartfelt thing to do, and is chastised and hunted down and fined. It wasn't natural. How ironic. Him driving on a paved road in his car, no natural interference. Try to save a little calf from drowning, unnatural interference. We have this whacked out view of what's intrusion or not, thinking paved roads are fine, cars, buses, motorcycles, snow machines, resorts, stores, gas stations, resorts, sprawling campsites with RVs, all fine. Yanking fish out of the waters, fine. Slaughtering bison, fine.
Desolation Wilderness near me, charging $5 per person per night just to backpack. There are very VERY few wild animals, pretty much some deer (which is rare to see) and lots of chipmunks. No rattlesnakes, no poison oak, no wolves, no grizzlies (even those in cabins get excited if they see a black bear once a year), it's a pretty sterile wilderness. Hence Desolation Wilderness. Much of it above treeline. I grew up there and took many dozens of dozens of trips. Due to yellow-legged frogs they stopped dropping fish in many of the lakes. There's plenty of yellow-legged frogs as many lakes are fishless because they can't sustain trout, but they can frogs. But they make most of the lakes fishless because of it. Because fishing is a popular draw for many hikers and they want to reduce hikers. Charge nightly per-person fees for even backpacking, controlling where you sleep much less entry quotas, no fires allowed anywhere (wonder why there's so many out of control fires in California when you can't gather and burn dead wood from the forest floor in fire rings).
Close more and more public lands to other recreational activities, like OHV riding, riding my Polaris RZR XP 4 1000 to amazing places, restrict more and more hunters. For the benefit and enjoyment of the people means for the benefit and enjoyment of entitled, wealthy, whacko environmentalists who want everything their way, shut-off to everyone else, because they hate other people enjoying our public lands. Charge more, restrict more, exclude more, and keep out the riff raff and those who can't afford to experience their own public lands that their uncle or grandpa died for.
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